Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Restoration Verse. 1910.

To Julia to Expedite Her Promise

John Cleveland (1613–1658)

SINCE ’tis my doom, Love’s undershrieve,

Why this reprieve?

Why doth she my advowson fly

Incumbency?

Panting expectance makes us prove

The antics of benighted love,

And withered mates when wedlock joins,

They’re Hymen’s monkeys, which he ties by the loins

To play alas! but at rebated foins.

To sell thyself dost thou intend

By candle’s end,

And hold the contract thus in doubt

Life’s taper out?

Think but how soon the market fails;

Your sex lives faster than the males;

As if, to measure age’s span,

The sober Julian were the account of man

Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian.

Now since you bear a date so short,

Live double for it.

How can thy fortress ever stand

If it be not manned?

The seige so gains upon the place

Thou’lt find the trenches in thy face.

Pity thyself then if not me,

And hold not out, lest like Ostend thou be,

Nothing but rubbish at delivery.

The candidates of Peter’s chair

Must plead grey hair,

And use the simony of a cough

To help them off.

But when I woo thus old and spent

I’ll wed by will and testament.

No, let us love while crisped and curled;

The greatest honours, on the aged hurled,

Are but furlows for another world.

Tomorrow what thou tenderest me

Is legacy.

Not one of all those ravenous hours

But thee devours.

And though thou still requited be,

Like Pelops, with soft ivory,

Though thou consume but to renew,

Yet Love as lord doth claim a Heriot due;

That’s the best quick thing I can find of you.

I feel thou art consenting ripe

By that soft gripe,

And those regealing crystal spheres.

I hold thy tears

Pledges of more distilling sweets

Than the bath that ushers in the sheets.

Else pious Julia, angel-wise,

Moves the Bethesda of her trickling eyes

To cure the spittle world of maladies.